Political correctness imposes crippling constraints. More so when you want to depart from the mandated stereotype of the Dalit as a victim. This is a problem felt across cultures. I remember how American stand-up comics, and other satirical shows that revelled in screwing incumbent Presidents, bemoaned that Obama was off limits. You could not target America’s first Black president. Someone with his good looks, grave professorial air, eloquence that had intellectual heft and emotional appeal, everything that made him charismatic, challenged writers of comedy and satire (except for white supremacists, of course). A similar taboo, unwritten but dominant, prevails when you want a Dalit hero with grey shades to evoke an ambivalent response. For taking this on, you have to grant it to Manu Joseph’s debut novel that Sudhir Mishra brings to screen. Serious Men is seriously not a film that even Indie cinema would dare to handle. It is thanks to streaming platforms, that Serious Men could be made. A satire that takes on the elite science community, and a Dalit hero’s vengeance in a rather complicated, ambiguous manner, touches on themes usually considered untouchable.
Ayyan Mani (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) is PA to a top scientist, Dr. Aravind Acharya (Nassar) at a very prestigious research centre (something like the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) that is government funded. Mani is a sponge, picking up disparate bits of information, thirsting for the education he could not get. He is a quick and cunning learner of not only scientific information, but also will pour over dictionaries to write a pompous letter requesting paternity leave. He is a survivor who aims high — to make his son an equal of those born to privilege. He has a simple gradation of social hierarchy, from 1G to 4G—first generation learner to the fourth—which doesn’t need to work, but idles around swimming pools of five-star hotels. He is a Dalit who calculatedly uses the victim card to shame the staff of the admissions department of a prestigious school when his slow-learner son is denied admission even though he tries to bluff his way. He claims Dr.Acharya for a colleague on back-slapping terms, while the top boss is snooty, and discourages Mani from speaking to him in Tamil – their mother tongue. Mani hates and admires the arrogance of the man (Mani always sports a tie at work like his boss) who dismisses inconvenient questions with the non-sequitur: I can’t deal with primitive minds like you. It is a sentence Mani coaches his young son Adi (Aakshath Das) to use with a precocious dismissive attitude to angry teachers, or persistent journalists.
The film hinges on the ethics of manufacturing a child prodigy as a means to upward mobility for a family living in Mumbai’s dingy BDD chawl, peopled by a cross section of the marginalised — a jobless, wife-beating drunk, a frustrated father throwing out a young girl for failing her exams, other layabouts hanging around aimlessly. Adi is the shining star, the example of a genius who is courted by the media and the local politician, Keshav Dhavre (Sanjay Narvekar) and his US-educated daughter Anuja (Shweta Basu Prasad). How does Mani cook up this scam? He uses Adi’s hearing impairment to rig up his hearing aid with a bluetooth. So when Adi is being quizzed on TV or a live show, Mani gives him the answers, using calculators and smartphones. He has learnt the con game from Dr.Acharya, who milks grants from ignorant, easily bamboozled ministers with his theory of alien microbes in the stratosphere as clues to the origin of life on earth. Mani noses out the fraud and the failed balloon expedition, and passes on the evidence to a disgruntled subordinate who is denied funds for his own more authentic research. The film has fun at the expense of scientists spouting gobbledygook as abstruse knowledge not understood by common ignoramuses. Mani catches on the tricks of the research trade, and spins out an elaborate scam to fool gullible public, and create a media circus around the boy genius, who is touted as both Ambedkar and Einstein.
Adi talks of child labour used for cocoa cultivation in South America/Africa, alien microbes and injecting humans with photosynthesis to enable efficient oxygen absorption, all with equal glibness and endearing solemnity of a kid wearing outsize glasses. The script by a quartet of writers aims satirical darts at select and also random targets, and in the process, blunts the satirical edge. Embedded in the circus and game of exposure (of Acharya) and then the subsequent bargain struck between the erstwhile boss and PA, is the poignant story of a driven father, and a hapless child. Adi’s genius act is a secret between the father and son. Oja (Indira Tiwari) is a loving wife and proud mother, but she is deliberately kept out of it. Mani berates Adi for failing to learn a speech and finally the poor child breaks down — he jumbles many of the speeches he has learnt by rote, and Mani looks at the nervously pacing boy with contempt. The sobbing child finally lies down, and now comes the bravura scene of pure visual drama. Take a bow, Alexander Surkala, whose cinematography has been unobtrusive most of the time, A top angle shot of the boy, a beam of light suddenly illuminating the dingy room as it falls diagonally across the boy on the bed. The father watches in silence. The loneliness of the boy, who feels he has let down his father by forgetting the speech on stage and having shared the secret with Sayali (the girl thrown out by the father), who seems to be his only friend. Mani is stoic, but not defeated. Yet.
Acharya learns of the scam, and how Mani betrayed him. Mani gets into action to retrieve some credibility. Davre helps Acharya get his job back, and the scientist presides over a public meeting, and subtly pleads for a child to be left alone to be a child. Adi confesses he knows nothing. Regret, pride, and love suffuse his eyes. If an actor had to carry and convey so many emotions in one shot, there could be no better choice than him. It is a moment of pure cinema — an expressive face bathed in surreal light for the camera eye. What follows is a reconciliatory aftermath — Mani recalls his childhood. The villainous boss turns an understanding mentor of sorts. The sudden humanising of Dr. Acharya ensconced in his sense of superiority seems plot driven, not organic to the character.
The Mani family shifts to a coastal village. Oja runs a small shop, and picks up Adi from school. Mani is a solitary figure on the empty beach. Adi walks up and stands next to him. Their back to the camera, the sea before them as twilight descends. The man and boy together, is an image with many resonances. You go back to the iconic Bicycle Thieves, as the boy walks with the father who has lost his bicycle and job. Apur Sansar — Soumitra Chatterji walks with the son he has come to meet after years of wandering. Serious Men makes you remember these images, but without speaking to us. Not in a significant way. The boy goes to the father now in a lungi, the natty office look abandoned. The straight shoulders aren’t that straight anymore. Has Ayyan Mani accepted defeat? The conniving Dr.Acharya — educated, Brahmin — goes scot free after committing fraud. Incompletely educated but street smart, Dalit Mani seems to have opted out of the system he had tried to game. A bleak conclusion to the noir-tinted satire gone awry, Such a mood-shifting narrative is the opposite of what audiences are slowly accepting in purposeful films. Article 15, Anubhav Sinha’s hard-hitting thriller, documents the horrific state of affairs for Dalits, and more specifically, Dalit women, in UP’s badlands. Article 15, that won the first Screen Writers Award for best screenplay, gets even more relevant after the brutality and cover up of Hathras. Dalit issues are not yet suitable for irony and ambivalence. The brutal reality demands an equally searching and unequivocal realistic depiction. Ambiguity doesn’t lend the right lens to capture the bitter harvest we are reaping as people, and a society.